Azealia Banks Talks About Her Abusive Past and Sleeping With Married Men

Vixen

On stripping and sleeping with married men:
“The best thing about fame, however, is the money. She was “mad broke” until just over a year ago. At one point, she was so poor, she worked at a strip club and had her boyfriend pay the rent. He would drop by her house while she ‘smoked weed’ all day, until one day she noticed a man sitting in a car outside, ‘and I’d be like, who is this? What is he doing there? He’d just stare at me.’ The man was a private detective, hired after his wife found out about their relationship.”

“My boyfriend had started on me, like, ‘I don’t love you any more’, just hurtful stuff, and, of course, my young dumb-A$$ started sending his wife emails. And I was psycho, and all of a sudden the same man popped up at my door with $10,000 and was like, ‘If you want this $10,000, you need to give me all your phones and computers.’ ” He wanted to get rid of “anything I could send his wife.”

On loving white men and sex:
She loves white men. She has written songs about how much she likes “marshmallows”. She is also frank about her “daddy issues”. She was constantly pestered for sex by older men when she started out, responding, she says, by having sex with “some of them”. And did she enjoy it? “Of course I enjoyed it. Girl! That is the best thing, you already know.” Sometimes she cries if she hasn’t had enough sex. She has slept with “like, 25 or 30” people in total. “I’m not even ashamed of it,” she says. She thinks about sex “all the time. Like, oh, please.”

On her oldest suitor:
The oldest man she has dated was 56. He used to come in and flirt with her when she was working in Starbucks, “and he was really rich, of course. When I was little, I had a radar for that.” He would take her to dinner in Chelsea, “and we’d be in some fancy restaurant and I’d be there with my sweat suit on”. He thought it was “the funniest thing ever. He really got off on it.” What was it like, being 17 and sleeping with a 56-year-old? “It’s like f****** an old man,” she says. She has since set herself boundaries. “I’m not dating any men over the age of 37.” She has a huge crush on Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, “and I met him in Portugal recently and it was really awkward”.